Nobody can deny that Pippa is a campaigner. Her friends say it, her children complain about it, even her opponents – she tries very hard not to call them her enemies (in public) – say it. The leaflets with Liberal Democrats on the front say it; the newspapers with Liberal Democrats in tiny letters on the back say it. Curiously, none of them ever mention what she campaigns for, or whether any of these campaigns have ever been successful – but that is really beside the point.
Ten years ago, she was campaigning against Brexit. (She might have had more of an impact had she campaigned before the referendum, but that is also beside the point.) During Covid, she campaigned against Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his shocking refusal to follow Independent SAGE; later on, she took the knee for Black Lives Matter. That didn’t really work as campaigning – no one could see her unless they saw the photos on Facebook, and even then, her aunts thought she and the girls were doing lunges with Joe Wicks again – and so she painted ‘Black Lives Matter’ on a sheet and hung it out of her bedroom window. It may have been more eye-catching had she had a paint less subtle than Farrow & Ball’s Elephant’s Breath, left over from redoing the mezzanine, but still it sent a powerful message to any minoritised ethnic individuals that they were welcome in Chipping Monckton. Should any of them ever visit Chipping Monckton.
Pippa desperately misses diversity and multicultural high streets – although not enough ever to move back to Lewisham. She tries to do her bit: when it’s her turn to do the tea for the old folks in the village hall, she makes samosas and Jamaican patties – although, now that she thinks about it, they haven’t asked her to do the tea since last year. When she does singing lessons, she gets the kids to do African-American Spirituals – she had to make the school buy a whole new set of hymnbooks in the name of political correctness. Luckily the headteacher found some room in the school’s budget – thank the Lib Dems for the Pupil Premium! – and Pippa didn’t have to remonstrate with the Tories on the board of governors. Campaigning is so much easier when you only have to persuade the person you share an office with.
She also found, after she joined the Liberal Democrats, that campaigning was easier when it was hyperlocal. She learnt this word at her first meeting, where she also learnt the vital importance of wooden spatulas. Previously, she’d only ever used silicon spatulas, so as not to damage her Le Creuset pots, but you can’t use Le Creuset spatulas to shove leaflets through recalcitrant letterboxes; she now has a wooden spatula – signed by Ed Davey! – that is reserved for leaflet delivery.
Hyperlocal campaigning meant that the exact same people that she argued with on the governors’ board, or in the village hall committee, or the parish council, suddenly seemed on board with her arguments about sustainability and protecting the environment and the need to place need before greed. The people who had thought she was pushy when she ran for chair of Neighbourhood Watch after she’d only been in the village two months suddenly seemed happy for her to be the spokesperson for the ‘Stop the Pothering Development’ campaign. And, to be fair, the revelation that the land was being developed by a company that planned to make a profit sounds more convincing coming from her than from the retired lawyers and businessmen who live in Pothering. People might think they were more concerned about the value of their property investment than about biodiversity!
It was probably hyperlocal campaigning that won Pippa a seat on the county council at the last election. (The collapse of the Conservative vote, and the fact that everyone in Chipping Monckton finds Reform a bit, well, common, might have helped.) This time, she was almost as confident of winning as her leaflets had always pretended – and her bar chart actually understated the LibDem share of the vote. She has been a great success as a councillor: she has already blocked the Pothering development, the proposed phone mast and the development of Coverley Hall as a wedding venue.
But there is something that she hadn’t expected. After the council decided to pedestrianise Market Street – installing bollards at each end to prevent traffic – people started trolling her on Facebook. No matter how many times she explains that the council officers were acting in accordance with best practice and government guidelines, people keep bringing up the consultation the council had conducted. Pippa knows for a fact that the silent majority want less cars on the road, and that is more important than the results of the consultation, even if it was 90 per cent opposed. She’s gone on local news to complain about the constant sniping and criticism and insulting – or campaigning, as her opponents call it.
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